Comment by irishcoffee
3 days ago
UBI will never happen. I don’t understand why it’s even brought up anymore. Social security isn’t even solvent, health care is a disaster, and people still trumpet UBI like all of the enormous glaring funding holes don’t exist.
It’s embarrassing at this point. Give it up.
And what's your solution to mass unemployment due to AI?
If you play this out, UBI or some near variant is inevitable.
The US currently has over 100 million people over the age of 16 who are unemployed.
What point do you think you’re making about mass unemployment, exactly? It’s been here for half a decade already.
That’s mostly normal and fine though. For example my parents are retired and spouse takes care of our kid.
Now imagine 200 million unemployed people over the age of 16.
Why are you correct even though the early Marxists (who posited that capitalism would inevitably lead to socialism) were wrong? We have had mass production for a hundred years without any hint of socialism.
And I would like you to be right, by the way. But why should I believe you?
Doesn’t most of the developed world already have various forms of socialism? The U.S. is an outlier here, which is due a number of factors unique to this country.
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We have state supported pension plans in most developed countries, unemplyment insurance, these large welfare states with extensive public education, national health and so on, so while the means of production mostly haven't been socialized, the fruits often have, through taxation. Now, some of this existed before the Industrial Revolution -- I wasn't aware how much until I read Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, which is a more important book now than ever, I humbly propose, but the scale is dwarfed by what we have now. And as Polanyi points out, we did get socialism as a response, as well as fascism, which was often btw called corporatism (as in the nation as a single body, not having to do with companies). Liberal democratic capitalism won out, for a while, and in large part because it became social democracy, or so goes a claim to which I subscribe. Without the social welfare aspects of modern democracy, the system would likely have broken politically.
> without any hint of socialism.
You don't seem to know your history.
The US was on track to enact UBI. The US was socialist directly after the great depression.
Some of the most successful capitalist societies (the Nordic countries) have socialist elements.
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If AI really generates so much wealth UBI becomes much easier to justify and downright irrational to not implement.
Anyone who thinks wealthy people willing part with any amount of wealth en masse hasn't studied history.
One of the reason democracy has tended to be a stable form of government is that it naturally finds a balance between the haves and the have nots -- the boundary where the haves are comfortable parting with that much to live in a stable society where they keep the remainder, and the have nots are afforded some amount of social services for their most accute needs.
That's all predicated on a "or riots / internal military action" alternative though.
We've lived through a pretty stable post-WWII economic bargain period, and historically there's not a ton of certainty that continues through distributive renegotiations, which tend to be bloody.
If AI makes GDP per hour of labor 2 times higher than that makes it very easy to provide UBI.
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UBI money needs to come from somewhere. Hence it will and can never happen. Fake money helps nobody. There is no difference between getting 0, 1000 or 10000 fake dollars a month if they value of the dollar will go to zero
It isn't fake it is the wealth created by AI. Think of it like a national dividend.
This frustrates me so much. Where is the money coming from? The middle class _is_ the economy, if they all decide to say “fuck it, UBI is enough” or can’t get a job, who the hell is funding UBI? This is an enormous hole in the UBI discussion that’s just completely ignored.
Again, we can’t even keep social security solvent, which is basically UBI for old people. It won’t work, the math doesn’t math, and everyone who wants UBI to be a thing just completely ignores this fact.
So frustrating.
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we just need to break the second law of thermodynamics, no big deal